mump

Perhaps borrowed from Middle Dutch mompen (“to mumble”), akin to German mimpfeln (“to mumble”), Icelandic mumpa (“to take into the mouth”). See also English mum.

mump (third-person singular simple present mumps, present participle mumping, simple past and past participle mumped)

1. (transitive, intransitive) To mumble, speak unclearly.
   • 1773, Oliver Goldsmith, "Epilogue Spoklen by Mrs. Bulkley and Miss Catley [intended for She Stoops to Conquer]":

     Who mump their passion, and who, grimly smiling,

     Still thus address the fair with voice beguiling […]

2. To move the lips with the mouth closed; to mumble, as in sulkiness.
   • 1630, John Taylor, "The Necessitie of Hanging":

     He mumps, and lowres, and hangs the lip […]

3. (intransitive) To beg, especially if using a repeated phrase.
4. To deprive of (something) by cheating; to impose upon.
5. To cheat; to deceive; to play the beggar.
   • 1774, Edmund Burke, "Speech on American Taxation, April 19, 1774":

     Your ministerial directors blustered like tragic tyrants here; and then went mumping with a sore leg in America, canting, and whining, and complaining of faction, which represented them as friends to a revenue from the colonies.

6. To be sullen or sulky.
   • 1948, James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor:

     It remained necessary to make a shift at bearing yourself like a man; not mumping, not moping.

   • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 2:

     The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records show.

• mumper
• Mumping Day

mump (plural mumps)

1. (obsolete) A grimace

mump (plural mumps)

1. (Britain, dialectal, Somerset) A cube of peat.